Health-care woes are terminally funny in ‘So Much for That’
Just when you’re sick to death of hearing/talking/thinking about health care reform, along comes a delicious novel about … why we need health care reform.
So Much for That, Lionel Shriver’s improbably feel-good black comedy, is the rare book that can make suicide, near-bankruptcy and terminal cancer so engaging you can’t wait to turn the page.
It’s no secret that Shriver (We Need to Talk About Kevin, The Post-Birthday World) is brainy. But who knew she could be so witheringly funny? She turns irony into an art form here — but also reveals herself to be a real softie at heart.
So Much for That opens with 48-year-old New Yorker Shep Knacker finally ready to make good on his promise to pack up and move to a remote island. He’s purchased three non-refundable tickets to Pemba in East Africa — if his teenage son and wife, Glynis, want to join him.
But Glynis has a surprise of her own. She’s just been diagnosed with a rare form of cancer called peritoneal mesothelioma, and she needs Shep’s health insurance. So much for that.
Shep’s longtime threats to quit his job and move to paradise (he calls his fantasy the “Afterlife,” a place that, unfortunately, the very ill Glynis may well be headed) are something of a joke around the office. Shep still works at the Brooklyn handyman business he once owned and then sold to an employee (who’s now his nasty boss) for a million dollars, mostly, it seems, so he can hang out with his best friend, the amusing blowhard Jackson Burdina.
Jackson, who has a hyper-articulate teenage daughter who suffers from an awful disease called familial dysautonomia, knows the agony — and dollar drain — that awaits Shep, thanks to the World Wellness Group, “the health insurance company from hell.”
Meanwhile, good-guy Shep, who perhaps is paying an unfair price for nearly flitting off to Pemba, is slavishly devoting himself to the prickly Glynis, a metalwork artist whose grand output totals a handful of (artfully turned) kitchen implements.
But Shriver’s sharply observed characterization captures Glynis’ appeal to her husband: He loved “her dry sense of humor, her slyness, the beguiling barbarity of her character.”
As Glynis’ illness progresses — and her oncologists encourage her to fight improbable odds, no matter what it costs, physically or financially — her fury grows. “On top of everything else I’m supposed to have cancer well,” she protests.
So Much for That follows a trajectory that might surprise you. It’s provocative, entertaining — and so very timely.
